Blog:

One click and you have the web page forever

Posted by Philip Constantinou on 26 Jun 2008

Posted by Philip Constantinou on 26 Jun 2008

What’s the toughest thing to remember? For me, it’s websites. Everyday, I visit tons of sites: blogs, shopping, news, recipes, and travel. It’s too much. I’ve actually stopped bookmarking because it’s so hard to find anything in the sea of links, and when I do go back, the page is often gone or changed. Since Evernote is a single place for all of your memories, (websites you visit are memories too, you know) we thought we could do better.

Introducing, the new Evernote Web Clipper, which gives you the ease and simplicity of bookmarking, but more importantly, also gives you context by saving the text, images, and links, including the source URL, right into your Evernote account. Once the page, or part of a page, is saved into your account, you can tag, organize, search, browse, edit, and remember it forever.

I use the web clipper when I’m researching vacations, looking for a good recipe, or when I run across neat technical articles. With a single click, I have the content saved. So, even if the page goes away, my memory of it doesn’t.

Most importantly, because the web clipper is part of Evernote, you can have more than just copies of web pages. You can remember all sort of stuff such as, pictures, personal notes, doodles on napkins, and anything else, all accessible online, offline, and from your phone.

Here’s a short video where Andrew shows us how to install and use the web clipper:

Here’s another idea. Find a recipe online and clip it into Evernote. Then, when you’re at the store, bring the note up on your phone using Evernote Mobile Web: instant shopping list.

A little technical detail: You don’t need to reinstall the bookmarklet (the little browser button that says “Clip to Evernote”) if you already have it. It automatically upgrades to the latest version. Otherwise, go on and install it. Just drag or add the green clipper button below to your link bar.

Philip – great new addition to an already great product. How about some integration with social bookmarking services? I’d love to have all of my Delicious bookmarks automagically copied into Evernote, tags and all.

Keith—

hi, Im using evernote with firefox 3 and the evernote add on doesn’t update for it to do this. If i drag and drop to the bookmarks toolbar then it does it but the firefox extension isnt updated. Is there any way to get the firefox extension to do it?

Usually this happens with blog posts. I’ve tried it on 2 different computers, each using a different browser (Safari and Camino).

Soroush—

Nice to see this update! I really like that you can choose the notebook and add tags while still on the page.

On problem I had was that my previous clipper didn’t update properly and after logging in through the clipper, the evernote.com homepage would load in the frame. Easily fixed by using the clipper code, but thought I’d share.

Ernie Soffronoff—

GAH! Just yesterday I figured out an Applescript that would use the old way of web clipping to take an article from NetNewsWire to Evernote, and then the method changed that very night.

The new web clipper IS much nicer when in a web browser, don’t get me wrong, but it’s disappointing. NetNewsWire and Evernote are so complimentary it’d be nice to have a way to move content from one to the other, either directly through Applescript or via the web by fiddling a URL.

–Ernie

LostInaFog—

I dragged into my Firefox 3 Leopard but it doesn’t do anything. Does Ad-Blocker or other popup blockers keep it from working?

robreed—

OK not to be the negative guy here but…

First the promise of Evernote is clear. But the app falls short in key areas. I’m willing to overlook what the app doesn’t do well and either use something else or restrict myself to those features that work well for me until I read titles like this one, and then I a little upset.

“One click and you have the web page forever”

This is an unrealistically optimistic assessment of Evernote’s functionality. Rarely if ever does it does it faithfully capture a complete web page, which is precisely what the title suggests.

What it does do reliably is allow you to select a portion of text on the page and, and quickly save that text along with a link to the site back to an Evernote notebook. Don’t get me wrong, depending on what I’m trying to accomplish as a user this may be very useful, but is not what is promised.

While I’m at it:

Synchronization of notes

Clearly the synchronization features are the strong point of Evernote.

Text recognition

The text recognition features aren’t reliable, so they’re not particularly useful. Is it enticing to say

“Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.”

Yes, and if it worked reliably this would be a tremendously useful feature. Unfortunately, text recognition falls short or fails outright the vast majority of the type. It does work as one might hope occasionally. But something that works only occasionally is almost useless in practice.

Audio recordings

Are essentially impractical working under the limits of the free account.

Again, I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not complaining about the Evernote itself. But I am increasingly annoyed that there is an increasing gap between what Evernote does well and what is claimed.

I’d like to see a little more honesty in the marketing of Evernote.

George—

So what’s the difference between this feature and the browser extensions for Firefox and IE?

MrT—

“This is an unrealistically optimistic assessment of Evernote’s functionality. Rarely if ever does it does it faithfully capture a complete web page, which is precisely what the title suggests.”

But it DOES capture the entire web page. It does not capture the entire web SITE, of course, but the page you’re “clipping to evernote”, is saved as it should. One click is all it takes. Sure, will take more clicks if you want to add to a specific notebook or add tags etc.

robreed—

“But it DOES capture the entire web page. It does not capture the entire web SITE…”

Not true unfortunately. I certainly don’t expect Evernote to recursively work through an entire site, package it, resolve relative links, deal with external linking and complex dynamically generated sites, and then return the whole thing.

I’m not suggesting that Evernote should attempt to archive the entire Knowledge Base because I decide to clip http://support.microsoft.com/. This seems clearly not relevant to what Evernote is designed to do.

The problem is in the difference between a page and a file. A single page does not necessarily consist of a single static .htm/.html file. Increasingly this the exception rather than the rule.

The simple case is CSS. Stylesheets control both the look and layout of the site. Evernote does not reliably represent/capture stylesheets, so it can’t be said to capture an entire page. The design of a site is important (which is why people spend so much time, effort, and money on site design). It is potentially critically important to the value of a page. This is truer still with layout. If we don’t capture the layout of information on a page then the info may be awkward to work with at best and or even impossible to understand.

We can even lose content if we don’t capture images specified in in stylesheets. These images may be important to the communication of information on the page.

Inconsistent stylesheets are just one example of this problem. The fact is that Evernote does not accurately and reliably capture an entire page. At best we can reliably get the text of the page, and again this can be problematic.

I want to be clear that I’m not complaining about the level of functionality in Evernote. I think that would be inappropriate for a comment like this.

And for all I know it may have been an intentional design decision to have Evernote function the way it does. I’m only arguing that it shouldn’t promoted as if it does something that it doesn’t do, specifically,

“One click and you have the web page forever”

Such claims sound good but lead to disappointment and confusion, not to mention a lot of wasted time and effort on the part of the end user.

It’s an injustice to what is a solid product to promise that it does something it clearly is not designed to do. The risk is having people evaluate the app for what it isn’t rather than what it is, and no product will seem adequate if we focus on all of the things they can’t do, e.g. “This is a terrible WYSIWYG web design app because it doesn’t allow me to edit the photos I want to include on the site the way Photoshop does.”

Hugh—

What about the increasing number of Opera users?
I know we have our own inbuilt notes function that can take us back to the original website – but it would be nice to be included in the browsers that you think important! Or is it because Opera is not American?

J. D. Harper—

Has problems in Opera 9.5. Seems to clip OK, but the dialog window doesn’t go away after saving the page, and it acts like its’ constantly reloading whatever is supposed to be in that dialog.

Eric—

One note I’d like to point out here…

I’m a premium user and I really enjoy the freedom of having an encrypted page to work from, but I’ve been using a packet sniffer to test the web clipper application and although I did not see my user name or password, I was able to sniff the exact contents of the data I was trying to clip.

This poses a big problem since I would want to use the web clipper application from work and that doesn’t look like an option now 🙁

Michael Greenberg—

Evernote has become one of my “must have” pieces of software. It’s increased my productivity by a factor of 10. I absolutely couldn’t function without it now that I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s beyond my comprehension what all the complaining is about. Give me a break.

Harald—

Sorry about this Question: Do you think about to translate Evernote in different Languages!? I ask about, I tryed to introduce some of my Friends into Evernote. They liked it, but future they don’t like to use it, because it is to difficult/complex in English. Thank’s for yor Answer and

best Regards

Harald

AP—

I’m using the Windows version & Firefox 3.

Can’t seem to find how to access the source URL and click on it to take me back to the original page. End up having to ‘Send Email’ and the URL appears at the top of the mail.

Any advice on the correct way to access the source URL would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Chris—

I love Evernote. To me it is like an inspiration vacuum.

Antonio—

Trying now to use the clipper in Safari and getting a notice that the page cannot be clipped. THis is different behavior than recently where I could clip a page. Also, the little pop-up window only loads the Evernote website and does not give me the old options. Something has changed and things are not working right. I’m using Safari on a Mac.

robreed—

Quoting Michael Greenberg:

“It’s beyond my comprehension what all the complaining is about. Give me a break.”

To my way of thinking, all of the “complaining” is about making Evernote the best app it can be. Perhaps there is a more appropriate forum, like oh I don’t know… the forum http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/ 🙂 The only point I was trying to make is that managing expectations is a huge concern, which I do think is relevant to this post.

Some of the issues raised by others are important. For example, Eric’s comment that content of clipped pages isn’t encrypted under premium accounts.

According to this blog post

http://blog.evernote.com/2008/06/24/evernote-public-launch/

> For $5 per month (or only $45/year, because we’re bad at math), you can upgrade to a premium account. Premium users have their upload quota raised to 500 megabytes of new notes per month and get a number of other goodies, including enhanced security through SSL for all data transmission (free users only get SSL for login),

It sounds like web clippings should be encrypted. It would seem that “all data transmission” includes web clippings, which are certainly data being transmitted.

The illusion of security is worse than no security at all.

I imagine someone carelessly clipping the contents of confidential or sensitive information based on the assumption that “all data transmission” is encrypted.

I wonder if it’s true that information clipped from SSL enabled websites is then delivered as clear text to Evernote. If so, that should be made clear.

This issue is probably something that should be taken the the forums.

Best of luck to Evernote!

BR—

Absolutely Ridiculous !

I am defenitely not saving any personal Information on a small companys webservers.
But thats thae base concept of this app, I guess.

I’d like to have the option to use it for the desktop only tough, without any account at evernote.

Brian—

“So what’s the difference between this feature and the browser extensions for Firefox and IE?”

Someone already asked this question, which I also have, but there doesn’t seem to be an answer yet. Anyone?

I mean, I know the obvious technical differences, but is there a preferred method?

Rick—

I’ve been doing a series of blog posts on Evernote, so I’ll include this feature some time in the future. Interesting that I’ve used Evernote this summer for, among other things, vacation planning and recipes.

Dwayne—

As an IT Manager I can certainly see this being helpful for the many technical searches I do in a given day.

devenir riche sur internet—

I believe what you composed was very reasonable. However,
what about this? uppose you composed a catchier title?

I am not saying your information is not solid, but suppose you added something
to maybe get people’sattention? I mean One click and you have the web page forever
– Evernote Blog is a little plain. You could look at Yahoo’s
home page and see how they create news headlines to grab
people to click. You might add a related video or a related pic or two to get readers excited
about what you’ve written. In my opinion, it could make your
blog a litle bit more interesting.

JT—

There are two tools for clipping from Firefox to Evernote. “Evernote Web Clipper” is a FF add-on. It works on your local machine and creates a note in your local Evernote database, which is then synced. “Clip to Evernote” is a bookmark. It creates a note in your account on the Evernote server, which will be appear in your local Evernote database after you sync.

What is tantalizing about “Clip to Evernote” is the potential ability to be on any supported browser, anywhere, and clip into your Evernote account. Visiting your sister and want to clip that Google map on her machine so you can retrieve it from your cell when you’re on the road? The Evernote team could easily create a special page, imho, that could make this use case a no brainer (for example, evernote.com/clipnow would facilitate creating the bookmark on the local machine, after which the user could go back to the map page and clip away).

Evernote 2.x added a “Go to source web page” on every clip. That’s gone in Evernote 3. I finally discovered where the source URL can be seen: on the menu select View/Note List (F10). You can see it, but you can’t copy it. Aaargh! My suggestion to the Evernote team: restore the “Go to source web page” functionality via an icon at the top right of each note. There’s room, and the ’round trip’ capability would be great addition to the integration.

I have two quibbles about the Evernote Web Clipper add-on for Windows. When I select text in FF and hit the Web Clipper button, a dialog box appears in the very lower right of the screen. Quibble 1: This location is at the far end of the screen from where I just hit the Clipper button! Allow the user to relocate this dialog box and store the screen location, so it will come up in the user’s preferred location next time. Or make it a pop out of the Clipper button. Quibble #2: when I use this dialog box to create tags, the focus changes from FF to Evernote. Please bring up a Tags Assignment (or equivalent) box that does not steal the focus!

I’m a huge Evernote fan. Keep up the great work! The OneNote team must be furious. Ha!

jt

foxtrotcharlie—

Regarding the “Go to source web page” issue – there’s an icon at the top left of every note which will take you to the source web page.

Lynn Fogwell—

I have an iPod touch. I was really excited about this app until I hit the show-stopper. I need to have notes on my iTouch that go to and from my computer (web is OK too…) BUT, I am not always connected to the net and there is no local storage on the mobile device. All the notes and all the coolness is gone when I’m not tethered to the net. iPhone users: good luck reviewing all your notes on that next airplane flight!
You seem to understand the value of local copies flexible syncing for the (Mac) desktop app. It is ten times more important for mobile users.

Shirley—

I can’t see my notes on my Evernote web page. I am using IE 8 Beta.

Duncan—

I uninstalled the new web clipper (because it crashed my browser every time I clicked) and now my Firefox bookmarks are gone. Sigh.

leo—

hi guys,

an opera web-clip button is urgently needed.simply because opera is the finest browser so far.come on 🙂

Glen—

Bang on. Although the bookmark provides the function.

Knl—

I am on an ipad2 and it won’t let me drag the green web clipper link into my safari link bar, any help is appreciated, thx!

M—

Trying to figure out if a clipping disappears once the original page goes offline, or goes behind a firewall. Anyone has experience with this?

tds—

+1 for a button in the Opera browser. It’s my favorite browser as well, fast and great features.

ML—

Second, the request for an opera clipper.
I appreciate that there is tbe bookmark and theat there might be a workaround with memonic but I would appreciate a proper extension for opera – please 🙂